James Rupert in Kinshasa
Three generations of Andre Miku’s family live in the concrete-block compound they have built over decades around a dirt yard and a mango tree. Of 11 people who live here, none has a formal job.
Miku (70), a retired mechanic, receives a government pension of $7 a month. The family rents out two rooms that open on to the street to a shopkeeper and a flour miller. The women sell bread and vegetables from a rickety wooden table outside the front door. The men do odd jobs. A daughter in the United States and a son in New Zealand send money once in a while.
Leaning forward on a wooden bench, Miku guessed the family earns $200 a month. Normally, that gets them a diet heavy in manioc or rice, and sauces made with vegetables but not meat. It pays for water and electricity but not medical care.
These days are not normal. Since Congolese rebels fought their way to the edge of Kinshasa last month, this city of about five million people has been cut off from normal supplies of food, fuel and electricity. Prices for staple foods have quadrupled. “People cannot afford even a meal a day,” Miku said somberly. “We try to keep at least the children fed.”
After the Kinshasa office of the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) said last Tuesday that only four days of food supplies remained in the city, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands began ferrying emergency food and medical supplies across the Congo River from Brazzaville, the capital of Congo.
But truckers who normally keep Kinshasa supplied say seasonal rains, due to begin in about three weeks, will mire traffic on Congo’s main overland supply route from Matadi downriver and threaten months of crisis.
The shortages in Kinshasa – which Congolese say extend to towns in the interior – are rooted partly in the long neglect of a single road and a single rail line that handle virtually all this vast country’s seaborne imports.
Ships must dock at Matadi, below the Congo River’s falls and rapids, and let trucks and trains carry goods to Kinshasa; from here, they easily can be sent by barge up the river’s dense network of tributaries.
Belgian colonial roads, like other infrastructure, were neglected under the 32-year rule of Mobutu Sese Seko. When Laurent Kabila ousted Mobutu 16 months ago, he pledged as a priority to repair the Matadi-Kinshasa link.
The government reinforced the railway’s rolling stock, but the single-track line can carry only a fraction of the imports from Matadi, leaving the road as the main lifeline. At best, in the dry season, trucks lumber over the 360km in two days – an average of less than 8km per hour.
The government was preparing its repair project five weeks ago when the war interfered, government officials said. Rebels from eastern Congo, backed by Rwandan and Ugandan troops, seized Matadi. They captured the nearby Inga Dam across the Congo River and cut off electricity to Kinshasa and surrounding areas.
Sixteen months after Mobutu’s overthrow seemed to promise a lessening of the miseries of life here, the shortages and blackouts have deepened Kinshasans’ frustrations, Miku said, adding: “If people could just afford one or two meals a day, they might have some confidence in our political leaders.”
Despite the popular frustrations, Kinshasans have rallied around Kabila for the moment, because they see the war as an external attack by Rwanda and Uganda and because the anti-Kabila forces destroyed food stocks and electrical lines.
Hospitals in Kinshasa, which lack basic medicines and supplies at the best of times, barely have been able to feed patients, including hundreds injured in the fighting in late August. Government officials say many bodies from the battles are buried in shallow graves where they could contaminate water and threaten disease. – The Washington Post